How Different From Chimpanzees?

Scientists are not immune to
the common problem of anthropomorphizing. We tend to look at all other
animals through human consciousness. However, when conditioning is
stripped away, animal brains do not work anything like the conscious human
brain.

A favorite trick
I used to do with my friends was to introduce them to the
"counting" dog. My parents had this terrier mix that was quite
"intelligent" by dog standards. I would ask my friend to pick a
number between one and five. I would hold up that number of fingers, and
the dog would bark out the count. What my friends didn't know (and never
caught onto) was that the dog would bark as long as I held up my hand. As
soon as the dog reached the correct "count" I would put my hand
down and the dog would be finished "counting."

Insight into how chimpanzees
really think can be seen in some recent experiments performed by Dr.
Povinelli. In these experiments, the researchers used the chimps' natural
begging gesture to examine how they really think about their world. They
confronted the chimps with two familiar experimenters, one offering a
piece of food and the other holding out an undesirable block of wood. As
expected, the chimps had no trouble distinguishing between the block and
the food and immediately gestured to the experimenter offering the food.

Next,
the researchers wanted to see if the chimps would be able to choose
between a person who could see them and a person who could not. If the
chimpanzees understood how other animals see, they would gesture only to
the person who could see them. The researchers achieved the
"seeing/not-seeing" contrast by having the two experimenters
adopt different postures. In one test, one experimenter wore a blindfold
over her eyes while the other wore a blindfold over her mouth. In the
other tests, one of the experimenters wore a bucket over her head, placed
her hands over her eyes or sat with her back turned to the chimpanzee. All
these postures were modeled after the behaviors that had been observed
during the chimpanzees' spontaneous play.

The
results of the experiments were astonishing. In the tests involving
blindfolds, buckets and hands over the eyes--the apes entered the lab and
paused but then were just as likely to gesture to the person who could not
see them as to the person who could. In several cases, the chimps gestured
to the person who could not see them and then, when nothing happened,
gestured again, as if puzzled by the fact that the experimenter did not
respond. In the case of experimenters facing with their backs to the
chimps, they performed as if they knew that those facing way from them
could not see and offer them food. However, subsequent experiments proved
that the chimps had merely responded to conditioning from the initial
experiments, since they had only received food from those experimenters
who faced them. This was proven by having experimenters facing away from
the chimps, but then turning to look over their shoulders. The chimps were
just as likely to gesture to the experimenters facing away as the one who
turned to look at them. Chimpanzees have no clue that humans must face
them in order to see. It is obvious from these experiments that
chimpanzees lack even a simple understanding of how their world works, but
merely react to conditioning from directly observable events. "Humans
constantly invoke unobservable phenomena and variables to explain why
certain things are happening. Chimps operate in the world of concrete,
tangible things that can be seen. The content of their minds is about the
observable world.“